The Corvallis Advocate and LENR

It seems that more and more magazines – both mainstream and peripheral – are publishing articles on LENR and cold fusion. The Corvallis Advocate recently posted an article titled “Cold Fusion: Hoax, Dream…and the Future of Green Energy?”

The authors, Jen Mattelis and Shawn Freitas, cover the beginnings of cold fusion in 1989, and focus on the use of palladium in most experiments. They also summed up some of the controversies surrounding the cold fusion process quite succinctly with:

“…the issue with cold fusion experiments has not necessarily been the lack of successful results – many generate the anomalous heat and nuclear reaction products that started all the excitement – but the inability of modern nuclear physics to explain the results of these table-top chemistry experiments.”

He follows up with:

“At this point the question is no longer whether or not something happens, but why does it happen.”

The ever improved understanding of nuclear physics is partially credited with the advancement of LENR, with Higgs Boson, particle colliders, and neutrino detectors being credited with making research in LENR more credible.

Still, LENR and cold fusion are still somewhat of a mystery to the scientific community:

“There seems to be an overall consensus among cold fusion researchers that no single reaction is responsible for the excess heat. The reactions are hard to study because they occur in a solid, making it almost impossible for us to see anything as it’s occurring – all we see are the products and we get stuck trying to reverse-engineer what happened at an atomic level.”

Mattelis and Freitas also cite a local scientist at a nearby university and his work in LENR. John Dash at Portland State University has been researching cold fusion for two decades, and has contributed significantly to a type of cold fusion called Trapped Neutron Catalyzed Fusion. His department at the university requested he begin studies after the Pons Fleischman demonstration in 1989.

Dash said he got results with his first experiment, at a time when many other scientists were having no luck creating a reaction. The result was that the majority of scientists managed to have cold fusion branded as a pseudo science. He credited his early success with the fact that he used the only palladium Portland State had on hand – palladium foil – rather than a bulk chunk of the metal. He also has succeeded in proving that a transmutation takes place in cold fusion. In his experiments, palladium is changed into silver.

The authors of the article also mention NASA, and MIT and their work in LENR. However, no mention is made of the only scientist to actually have a working safety certified LENR energy device on the market – Andrea Rossi.

Rossi has developed a LENR device that creates enough heat to run steam turbines and therefore, create electricity. He and his team are currently manufacturing a 1 MW unit to be delivered in February.